New Brunswick startup founder and angel investor Dan Martell Friday unveiled a service he contends will become the go-to advice site for his fellow entrepreneurs.

Called Answers, the program is being added to Clarity’s services. Launched last year in Moncton, Clarity is a “micro-consulting” site that allows entrepreneurs seeking advice to set up phone conversations with business experts.

Clarity boasts more than 20,000 experts, most of whom charge a per-minute rate for their time. The company has so far connected more than 30,000 calls across 50 countries, and takes a cut of each transaction. (Mr. Martell has personally taken nearly 1,200 calls since starting Clarity).

Answers will allow anyone to pose a question to Clarity’s roster of experts. Those who post questions can then follow up with a call to the experts who supply the most helpful information.

Mr. Martell says question and answer sites have long been a staple of the web, from Answers.com to Ask Jeeves, Yahoo! Answers, and Quora. His offering, however, is aimed solely at answering business and entrepreneurship queries. (Popular topics include marketing, fundraising, and productivity).

More importantly, he said, Clarity’s experts are vetted — they have to apply or be invited to join — which means the answers are credible and reliable. “On Clarity, anybody can ask a question, but only experts can answer,” Mr. Martell said.

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Answers is intended to bring new users — and thus new revenue — to Clarity. “It’s kind of like Quora, only with a business model,” he added. “We think this is going to be a 10-times growth driver for us.”

The Answers program is also designed to let experts display their knowledge, particularly those lacking large online followings. “We want to help people build their reputations so they can get paid for their advice,” Mr. Martell said. “That’s why it’s a complete game-changer. Nobody has ever done this.”

Answers was beta tested with 100 Clarity users and a group of current experts. The results: the average question was answered in 15 minutes, and received 2.4 answers. Five per cent of those who posted a question later set up a call with an expert.

Mr. Martell said that many experts make more than $1,000 a month from their Clarity billings.

Clay Hebert, the New York-based founder of CrowdfundingHacks.com, was one of the first experts to sign on with Clarity. He provides advice on marketing and crowdfunding. He has helped 26 entrepreneurs raise US$2.4-million through crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Mr. Hebert said he uses Clarity to “filter” the requests he receives for random “coffee meetings.” “My time is worth a lot more than the $3 coffee,” he said.

On Clarity, Mr. Hebert charges $4.17 a minute ($250 a hour) for his time. (He donates all his Clarity billings to Charity Water, a non-profit that provides safe drinking water to people in developing countries).

“What I’ve found with Clarity is that when the clock is running, even when the money is going to charity, people get right to the point and ask their questions,” he said. “It’s more efficient for me.

“The real value is in the focus. It’s focused on business and entrepreneurship so you know what you’re getting,” said Mr. Hebert, who participated in Answers’ recent beta test.

Dan Martell doesn’t want to be harsh on startups, but most of their products suck.

“I know, because I’ve built my own,” he said. “And they sucked [too].”

Mr. Martell is a Canadian entrepreneur, investor, and the CEO and founder of Clarity, a ten-month-old platform for fellow entrepreneurs to give and receive advice. He delivered his remarks to a crowd of GROWTalk attendees from the startup community in Toronto on Thursday.

Mr. Martell was one of two speakers to discuss the subject of metrics – both with different perspectives on their value and use in building a product that can succeed.

“Measure sh*t, test sh*t, try sh*t. That’s what I do every day,” he explained, describing Clarity’s approach to weekly measurement as part of the lean startup philosophy. Mr. Martell said that measuring such things as user retention and the popularity of core features is key to successful growth.

But Michael Litt, co-founder and CEO of Vidyard, a platform for video analytics, took an opposing view view.

“All of these metrics are useless at the early stage of your company,” Mr. Litt told attendees, in a talk titled Don’t be a Dummy, Avoid Focusing on the Wrong Metrics Too Early.

“Investors are pushing these metrics down your throat.”

Mr. Litt didn’t entirely dismiss the use of metrics when used later in a startup’s existence, however – rather, he told the crowd that numbers mean little when you can only draw data from a small pool of early adopters.

Instead of trying to understand the behaviours and needs of your tens or hundreds of users from behind a dashboard, he suggested getting on the phone and talking to each and every one those users instead.

“You cannot create a dashboard that will predict your startup’s success until you hit best product fit,” Mr. Litt said of his consumer-focused approach.

“Make sure you build a dashboard and focus on those metrics at the right time.”

According to Mr. Martell, however, even tracking the habits of a relatively small subset of users is a good way to identify trends and habits – as long as you’re gathering enough data.

Clarity keeps track of its users’ activity streams – in other words, the interactions, messages and myriad data points that are generated between users and the platform itself – with the goal of separating the casual and curious users from the users who understand a product’s core value.

“You might have features that you think are your core that are really retention features,” Mr. Martell explained, “and that’s not what people use.”

The distinction between retention features (what keeps users coming back) and core features (what your product is really about) is something he’s found easier to recognize by observing the data generated by his users’ activity streams.

“If you’re lucky to have 20, 30, 40 of these core product users, watch what they do.”

A New Brunswick startup that’s striving to be the “eBay of advice” has secured a major fundraising haul from some of North America’s top tech investors.

Moncton-based Clarity announced today a $1.6-million investment round. Among the its investors are: Mark Cuban, Boris Wertz (the co-founder of AbeBooks and Version One Ventures), Baseline Ventures (a previous backer of Instagram and Twitter), and New Brunswick-based Gerry Pond, Canada’s angel of the year in 2011.

“It’s an awesome day,” said Dan Martell, Clarity founder and chief executive and a Moncton native, who drew investment cash from many of his Silicon Valley contacts and friends — most of whom are Clarity users.

The 32-year-old entrepreneur moved to San Francisco in 2008, following the sale of his social media company, Spheric Technologies Inc. In Silicon Valley he launched Flowtown, which Demandforce bought in 2011 for a figure “in the millions”.

Clarity HandoutDan Martell

Mr. Martell is now attempting to build on that record with Clarity. The startup encourages entrepreneurs to request a phone call with any of the hundreds of experts and mentors signed up at Clarity.fm. Advisors span from athletes to New York Times bestselling authors. Most of the advisors are experts on topics relating to startups and entrepreneurship: from marketing to raising capital.

Calls are connected through Clarity and each advisor charges a per-minute rate for their time. Mr. Martell takes 15% of the rate (unless the advisor is donating their fee to charity).

The startup boasts 7,000 members and, since its launch in May, has connected 12,000 calls across 47 countries. Mr. Martell said the financing would be used to help localize Clarity’s software to those regions to ensure entrepreneurs can seek out advisors who speak their language. He also plans to expand the ranks of his four-person company.

“Originally I was going to build it in San Francisco, but then I realized there’s a lot of great talent here,” Mr. Martell said about his decision to base Clarity in his hometown, providing further evidence of the East Coast’s strengthening tech sector. While he still flies to San Francisco regularly, rising business costs in Silicon Valley also helped convince him to set up his newest business in Canada.

“Business expenses and the cost of living have “exploded” in Silicon Valley, Mr. Martell said, citing the example, of a software engineer, who can demand a salary twice what Mr. Martell pays his New Brunswick-based developers. “I’m better off building the team and the product here,” he said.

California-based

was one of Clarity’s first investors. Mr. Lindzon, who has invested nearly US$8-million in about 50 companies through his Social Leverage fund and is -founder and CEO of StockTwits, said he is bullish on the startup’s ability to help professionals turn their expertise into cash. In other words, a consultant’s “inventory” is their time, and Clarity allows them to sell that time more effectively.

“I love the whole idea of turning your phone … into a monetization tool,” the Toronto-born entrepreneur and angel investor said from California. “Everybody is an expert in one thing. Clarity helps monetize that expertise.”

Mr. Martell insists he is not eyeing an exit. Instead, he said he’s focused on turning Clarity into the eBay of the advice world.

“Getting acquired isn’t on my radar,” he said. “We’re 100% focused on building the business.”

Tech entrepreneurs who say they owe their success to mentors and sound advice have a new tool to “pay it forward” to neophyte companies.

Clarity Inc., launched May 3 by entrepreneur Dan Martell, is an online service that provides tech startups with a portal to find and contact new mentors, while giving the advisors a tool to manage calls from entrepreneurs.

Having lost money on his first two failed ventures, 32-year-old Mr. Martell said his subsequent business success came, itself, at the hands of useful advice. For his third attempt, Mr. Martell, then 24 and living in Moncton, N.B., said he cold-called the New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna out of desperation in hopes of getting connected with experienced entrepreneurs. It worked.

“I probably would have went bankrupt or something if I didn’t connect with these other people, because when you’ve never been to business school, when you really just do things out of passion and every day is kind of like one step back, two steps forward, getting the advice from the right people can really change your life,” Mr. Martell explained.

He got the boost he needed to push forward with a third start-up, Spheric Technologies, a social enterprise consulting and applications company. At the time, it had 12 employees and was generating $1.2-million in revenue, but Mr. Martell said he wasn’t sure if that actually meant anything and he needed guidance.

“In hindsight, I laughed because of course that was really good. We were making a profit. We self-funded.”

For a budding company, basic advice such as how to build a relationship with a bank is vital, Mr. Martell said.

It was also a mentor recommendation that spurred Mr. Martell to move to San Francisco in 2008. The following year he started Flowtown Inc., a social media marketing company, which he eventually sold to small-business marketers Demandforce Inc. Demandforce was recently bought for $423.5-million in cash, a moment Mr. Martell called “life-changing” for his career.

Prior to the official launch, Clarity had rounded up more than 1,000 mentors, including Eric Ries, author of The Lean Start-Up and Josh Elman, who has worked with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Rypple Inc. founder Daniel Debow signed on to be an advisor and said the new program is a productivity tool for those already giving advice to emergent businesses.

On top of the practical benefit of having Clarity schedule his calls, Mr. Debow said connecting with young entrepreneurs is important to him because he can’t recall any day in which he and his team didn’t seek advice on their young enterprise from mentors. He credits his mentor, David Ossip of Workbrain Corp., and David Stein, his partner at Rypple, with his start-up success.

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“A lot of people have been incredibly kind to me, to teach me and guide me and mentor me to help me get to where I am.… This is just a really great way to give back,” Mr. Debow said.

Clarity requires users to log in with a Facebook account to ensure it is a real human being, Mr. Martell said.

Forcing those soliciting advice to follow a formal process encourages them to be prepared for the conversation with an advisor, maximizing the use of time.

“The structure helps to raise the barrier just enough to make sure that people are really serious and prepared and make good use of the time,” Mr. Debow said.

Individual mentors can decide whether to charge for their consultations. If they do, Clarity will take a 15% commission. However, only 10% of advisors charge a fee and 80% of those donate the money to charity, Mr. Martell said.

The service is mainly free because Clarity is focused on growth, not monetization, Mr. Martell said, and he doesn’t think using a total pay wall would be conducive to getting information to those who need it.

“If you are an 18-year-old entrepreneur in your friend’s basement and you want to call me, you shouldn’t have to pay for that just because I make other people pay, like the venture capitalists that want to pick my brain about an industry,” he said.

Next, Mr. Martell wants to expand the platform to reach entrepreneurs in other sectors and then eventually life coaches.

As a soon-to-be father, Mr. Martell said he has been actively seeking advice from other entrepreneur dads and thinks Clarity could be used to connect people to all types of mentors.

“I want to figure out how I can unlock information from people that have it and have been successful to those that are trying to do it for the first time,” he said.

Running a business means watching the numbers, but which numbers should you be watching? And which metrics are important at which point in your business? Our experts share their insight:

What metrics should my startup be monitoring?

If you’re still early, just build a simple dashboard with three top metrics (conversions to signup, activation, conversion to paid). That being said, we track everything, so we can create new metrics as the product evolves and new questions need to be answered. Also, it’s smart to start tracking the referral sources for each account so you can figure out your most profitable channels. It’s typically best to spend more than 60% of your metrics time getting qualitative feedback from your users either via usertesting.com, in-person, surveys, etc.

For Zendesk, it was about finding two key metrics to start analyzing and building a data-driven culture from that small, but significant beginning. Our original two: number of sign-ups for our free 30-day trial; number of credit cards submitted (trial to customers).

— Mikkel Svane, Zendesk founder

What metrics matter for mobile apps?

Depends on the app and what the key drivers of your business are. Knowledge is power. Try to measure the key influencing factors/variables in the business. For a consumer app, you need to measure: initial interest (if possible); actual downloads (could people get the app?); actual activations (could they install and run the app?) 1-, 7-, 30-, 60-and 90-day (etc.) retention numbers (did you keep their interest?); and, be able to track these metrics by source/store, geography, carrier, demographic, if possible.

If you can, track time spent within the app and what people do (do they use the app the way you expect them to?); track customer reviews/rankings, track the relevant measures of monetization – free vs. paid, in app purchases, upgrades, etc. Track downloads resulting from various marketing/promo initiatives, etc. Read what complaints people make, and try to analyze them, etc.

P.S. Can you tell I’m metrics-obsessed?

— Mark Ruddock, INEA founder

What about blog content? How long do people stick around and read? Do they comment? Do they chat about it on Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Does it spark blog posts by other bloggers? Does the mass media call you up for a quote? Do you notice traffic growing on other sites?

All of those are good, but they are meaningless unless you have the strategy upfront.

Starting a business solo means dividing equity is easy — 100% of the business is yours. But when you start to bring in other co-founders — technical, business development, marketing — then it becomes more difficult to divide up who owns how much of the business. Our experts share their insight on this:

The basics — how do you divide equity from the start?
If you start Day 1 together, then divide equity 50/50. Everything else is up for debate.

Give equity to people who deserve the most — the engineer who built it and the person who raises the money or gets the sales.

That being said, there’s a difference between giving someone 50% of the equity and making them a cofounder.

If someone wants the title of co-founder (even if it’s been a year since it was founded), do it – who cares? It is worth the value of having someone engaged for less equity.— Dan Martell, founder of Flotown.com and investor

What about bringing on someone — such as a CTO — early, but not right away?
Is this person your CTO or truly a co-founder? If CTO, then 1.5% to 3% is a good range. If a co-founder, you need to go higher — 10, 15, 20 points all sound reasonable. Whatever you agree to should be subject to vesting over time. Date before you marry.— Mark Macleod, partner at True Ventures

What if your product is already built?
There’s no perfect answer to this. But one thing I would definitely do is talk through the issues at hand. If you’re bringing on a cofounder, get to the important topics: How committed are they? Are they joining fulltime? What do they want from the business? What happens if you two disagree?

One more thing: Just because you have a product built through contractors, don’t assume you have a majority of your challenge resolved. There’s a chance your new cofounder will come in and want to throw it out and start over.— Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of Hubspot and founder of OnStartups

The “freemium” pricing model is a great way to engage users without requiring them to pay until they wish to access premium features. With different outlooks on the success of this model, how do you know if it’s the right choice for your business?

Decide if freemium fits your product.
I love freemium and focus on it as an investor.It is not for everyone. I see three conditions for its use:

a large, addressable market

the incremental cost of hosting each free user is essentially zero

a clear distinction between free and paid products

— Mark MacLeod, partner at Real Ventures

If your customers want to pay, let them pay.
I am a fan of charging right away. Why delay? It’s important feedback (arguably, the only important feedback).
I also believe in trials – it makes it clear the product isn’t free and forces a conversion relatively quickly (or not!)— Raymond Luk, partner at Year One Labs

Look to the success stories.
Dropbox, Mailchimp, Evernote are the premium brand names doing freemium right. Remember, in freemium, the free product is the product. If the free version doesn’t rock, then the economics don’t work.— Dan Martell, founder of Flowtown.com & Investor

A Moncton, N.B., entrepreneur who recently sold his Silicon Valley-based startup is set to launch another company this week.

On Jan. 5, Dan Martell will unveil Clarity.fm, a web-based application that links budding entrepreneurs to advisors and experts, before a crowd of 500 people at the Capitol Theatre in Moncton.

As Mr. Martell explains it, the service “connects speakers with seekers.”

Those speakers will include more than 350 of “the world’s best technology entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.” Real estate moguls, marketers and best-selling authors are also on board, he says. Spanning from Silicon Valley to Boston, New York and Canada, users will be a phone call away from the advisor of their choice. Once connected, the advisor aids the entrepreneur and charges a fee for his or her time.

“Clarity is the easiest way to get paid for your advice,” Mr. Martell says, adding that revenue will come from a cut of the advisor fees. Advisors can choose to donate their fee to charity (in which case Clarity won’t take a percentage). Mr. Martell says he hopes Clarity will generate $1-million for charity in January alone.

He left Moncton for Silicon Valley in 2008 after selling Spheric Technologies Inc., which developed social media applications for large companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble. Spheric Technologies, which Mr. Martell launched in 2004 with his life savings of $70,000 – it nearly went bankrupt in the first six weeks – turned out to be the inspiration for Clarity.

In San Francisco, he launched social media firm Flowtown with $750,000, which he raised from big name investors, including Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Software. That company was bought this past October by San Francisco-based Demandforce for a figure “in the millions.” As part of the buyout, Mr. Martell agreed to stay on at Demandforce for a full year. He resigned in December to focus fully on Clarity.

“I started working on Clarity and realized this has to happen right now,” he says. “I decided this idea is too important.”

Mr. Martell is self-funding the venture with roughly $200,000. Initially, New Brunswickers will get “first crack” at the service, says Mr. Martell, who is building a new house in Moncton and plans to live in the city half the year. After the official launch, Clarity will be available to anyone seeking entrepreneurial advice.

Many New Brunswickers, including Gerry Pond, the godfather of that province’s tech sector, are on Clarity’s roster of experts.

How did Spheric spark the idea for Clarity? Two years into the business, when Mr. Martell was completely lost, he got some advice from an unlikely source.

“I was clueless. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know if what I was building was interesting or a big waste of time,” he recalls.

Desperate, he sent a “cold” email to former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna, outlining his situation and asking for help. Mr. McKenna, now deputy chair of TD Bank Group, directed Mr. Martell to some of New Brunswick’s top tech founders, including Mr. Pond, Ken Nickerson, and Ian Cavanagh.

Mr. Martell still turns to them for advice. “Nothing will change an entrepreneur’s life more than talking to a person who has done it successfully before,” he says. “A 10-minute phone call can change a person’s life.”

]]>http://business.financialpost.com/entrepreneur/business-advice-from-experts-just-a-phone-call-away/feed0stdtelefon-1Maple Butter aims to connect Canadian tech founders with next generation of startupshttp://business.financialpost.com/entrepreneur/maple-butter-aims-to-connect-canadian-tech-founders-with-next-generation-of-startups
http://business.financialpost.com/entrepreneur/maple-butter-aims-to-connect-canadian-tech-founders-with-next-generation-of-startups#respondWed, 25 May 2011 12:26:59 +0000http://business.financialpost.com/?p=56295

Dan Martell was frustrated by what he saw as a communication breakdown.

It was during a trip home from San Francisco to visit his native New Brunswick earlier this year that the 31-year-old Canadian-born entrepreneur and angel investor first noticed the disconnect.

Canadians knew more about what was going on in Silicon Valley than Canadians living in Silicon Valley knew about what was happening the Canadian technology space.

Something had to change.

“That’s where I had this epiphany where I realized my friends in the technology industry in Canada knew more about what was going on in the Valley than I knew what was going on in Canada,” Mr. Martell said in an interview.

His latest brainchild, Maple Butter, is designed to close that communications gap by connecting successful Canadian entrepreneurs on both sides of the Canada-United States border with up-and-coming startups in the Great White North.

MapleButter.com is a new information resource for entrepreneurs, written exclusively by founders and successful entrepreneurs, Mr. Martell said.

In order to write for the blog, Mr. Martell said authors need to be “full-time technology founders” who are still active in the industry.

Mr. Martell — who is the co-founder of FlowTown.com, a social marketing platform designed for small businesses — said the site will focus on issues that will be of most interest to the owners of technology startups, including legal matters, option plans, vesting periods and tips on being acquired by larger firms.

Already, Mr. Martell has signed up an impressive roster of entrepreneurs to write for Maple Butter, including:

His eventual goal is to turn the site’s roster of contributors into a sort-of “scout team” of entrepreneurs armed with a seed stage fund for investing in promising entrepreneurs in Canada.

An angel investor himself — he has invested in 13 companies since 2006 — Mr. Martell said Canadian entrepreneurs who have seen success through an exit or cash flow want to get involved with the next generation of startups, but often don’t have the time to do so.

He’s hoping that by providing a forum to share knowledge and offer advice to young entrepreneurs, Canada’s top technology founders will be able to play a greater role in fostering the Canadian startup scene and prevent promising startups from relocating to Silicon Valley simply to chase funding and advice they feel they can’t find closer to home.

“It will be entrepreneurs supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs,” he said.

“I’ve been doing this without any structure for a while, but any entrepreneurs who have any level of respect, they feel it’s their responsibility to give back. I believe that having someone like Ryan [Holmes of Hootsuite] or Mike [McDerment of Freshbooks] bring that level of experience to the table can really make a difference.”